The word of the week is tremulous.
Jan 8 - Pixar... X-Wings?
Let's start the week out right: with Star
Wars!
Not just *any* Star Wars though, but a 'What if?'
kinda teaser:
What if Pixar had made a Star Wars animated film,
along the lines of Cars?
Cue a cute and very well-done trailer:
Jan 9 – Horizon: Zero Dawn
Wow! While looking for something
different to watch here and there at work this week, I stumbled upon this
'cutscene assembly movie' from the recent videogame Horizon: Zero Dawn, which
is described as:
Horizon: Zero Dawn is an exhilarating action role playing game developed by the award winning Guerrilla Games, creators of PlayStation’s venerated Killzone franchise. As Horizon: Zero Dawn’s main protagonist Aloy, a skilled hunter, explore a vibrant and lush world inhabited by mysterious mechanized creatures. Embark on a compelling, emotional journey and unravel mysteries of tribal societies, ancient artifacts and advanced technologies that will determine the fate of this planet, and of life itself.
Here's a synopsis review that doesn't
spoil too much about the story:
I quite enjoyed the 'cutscene movie'
which was almost 1.5 hours long and excellently written: for a near-future
story, it had great depth and the main protagonist of Aloy was an engaging
character all on her own. I especially liked her sense of curiousity, which
drove her to become what her world needed.
Great job, Guerilla Games - more
stories like this, please!
Jan 10 – Wisdom from Beyond
Some profoundly wise words today from
a 27-year-old young woman, who wanted to share them with the world shortly
before dying of cancer a week ago on January 4th 2018. She had her whole life
ahead of her, and speaks clearly about how her looming passing put her time
here into clarity:
Jan 11 – Pseudoscience
Ah, the ignorant things I see people type online
of a day...
Pseudoscience especially: it really IS true that
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and people are willing to listen to
anything that sounds somewhat plausible, despite there being so little science
involved that you couldn't fill a thimble with it.
Such as this posting, by an ardent
anti-climate-change commenter, who has NO idea how science works, but is quite
vocal in his opinion of how he thinks science works:
 |
| That's right folks - this is 'science' to some people... |
A common thread among folks like the guy above is
that they usually offer YouTube videos as 'proof' of their claims, or links to
non-scientific blogs. In Matthew's case, he pointed to the video below, which
contains such tenuous and flimsy pseudoscientific premises that anyone with an
ounce of scientific knowledge would dismiss them immediately:
We live in an age where anyone with
internet access can find solid scientific data, thousands of sites, yet garbage
videos like this draw people in like moths to flames.
I begin to see where pundits from the
sixties decried the death of knowledge when they coined the term 'boob tube' as
people tuned into television, and tuned out their brains...
Jan 12 – 2018's Films?
On a lighter note: this year's going
to be FULL of fine films!
Here's a HUGE LIST of 44 of the biggest
movies coming out in the next 11.5 months, and of that list, 14 are of mild to
MAJOR interest to me, as follows:
Feb 16 - Black Panther( HECK
YEAH! )
Feb 23 - Annihilation(
interesting? )
March 9 - A Wrinkle In Time( kinda...?
)
March 16 - Tomb Raider(
interesting? )
March 30 - READY PLAYER ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 6 - A Quiet Place(
Horror, so I may rent and watch it with the lights on )
May 4 - Avengers: Infinity War(
mostly interesting? )
May 25 - Solo: A Star Wars Story(
interesting? )
June 1 - DEADPOOL 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
June 15th - THE INCREDIBLES 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 6 - Ant Man and The Wasp(
interesting and funny? )
Nov 21 - WRECK-IT RALPH 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dec 21 - Aquaman ... and also Bumblebee!
As you can see from the list above,
many are sequels or reboots, but on the whole everything looks good enough to
see in the theatres... which would be a BIG change for me from 2017, where I
saw about six films in total on the silver screen.
Of all of them though, it's a
three-way tie between Deadpool, Ready Player One and Wreck It Ralph... those three alone will make 2018 a memorable movie
year!
Jan 13 – WTF, Hawaii???
For the millions of people living in
Hawaii, today was terrifying:
Though it turned out to be a false
alarm, I can only imagine the horror and helplessness people were feeling
there: there were reports of parents pushing their children down manhole covers
into the sewers for shelter, among other things.
What stunned me though was that so many
people were laughing it off online: comments ranged from "great
joke!" to "I wouldn't want to live in Hawaii today" to "I
keep hoping this isn't a joke" - the last comment should tell you how many
Neanderthals are still alive today and learn to use social media.
I never thought that the world
could so easily return to the state of fear akin to that of Cuban missile
crisis in the sixties, with nuclear annihilation was only a few breaths away. I
grew up in the 1980s, with the threat of MAD hanging over all our heads from
the US - Russian Cold War standoff, but it was never immediately real because
the public wasn't intimately and immediately aware of developments.
Cue Twitter and 45's penis-size
contest via nuclear proxy, and here we are today. I can only hope that everyone
who voted for 45 had enough of a shock today to begin re-thinking their support
of the madman with the nuclear button...
Jan 14 – Life Audits
I spend much of my time thinking, in
addition to doing.
While most of my doing is humdrum,
day-to-day tasks at work or the samesuch at home, my thinking tends to rove all
over the place... or at least, it used to.
For the last few years, much of my
thinking has been in 'survival mode' aka how to make money stretch, how to get
a better job, how to overcome my health issues. Little time was spent thinking
about fun things, or the future, or even interests outside the narrow scope of
immediate entertainment, or writing.
Going into 2018 with a better
financial sense of how this year is going to turn out month-to-month means that
my thinking can finally escape survival mode and get back to the business of
living life by examining it from a far freer scope.
Part of that means looking ahead, as
I mentioned above: where do I want to be in the near / far term, what do I want
to be doing, and how do I want to get there?
As is often the case, LifeHacker has
an article on just this sort of thing form back in 2013: Performing A Life Audit. It asks some excellent questions, such as:
· What life do I want? In 5, 10, 40 years?
· What areas of my life could be improved?
· What’s my motivation?
· What do I believe in?
· What do I consider essential?
· What does “meaningful” mean to me?
These questions, among others, will
help you get a handle on where you want to be and how you're going to get
there. As I described to my girlfriend today over a nice relaxing lunch at
Garrick's Head Pub, for years I've felt the disconnection between my knowledge
of what I need to do and my ability to achieve it, akin to seeing a series of
handholds rising up a wall towards success... but the bottom one is just out of
reach, no matter how hard I strained or jumped towards it.
My hope is that a firm financial plan
will provide the boost that I need to grasp that first run towards a far better
future this year, in all respects of my life.
It's been a good week: while I've made little progress on my novel, I made BIG progress in the financial side of things, and my health's teadily improving( I swam twice this week! )ao I'm going into this coming week with a steady stride...
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